Election Security Proposal

So I've been charged with researching electronic security requirements and I must say, from a risk management perspective this is unlike anything I've ever come across before.

What is the cost associated with voter fraud significant enough to steal an election? Half the population will be upset, the other half is likely to not only not care, but may actually be in favor of the fraud. Again, what is the cost? Some companies may benefit significantly if the election is swayed in a favorable way, but once the election is certified these gains will (presumably) be legal, so again this cost only harms some organizations while aiding others.

Is the burden of the cost only on those who's agendas stand in opposition the fraud? How many Americans wouldn't mind their candidate winning by fraud? How many would give an honest answer to this?

Considering the amount that a given organization could gain by stealing an election, it makes sense to assume that such an organization would be willing to spend a great deal to that end. Does it then make sense for the already drained local, state, and federal governments to bother spending anything to secure the elections? (An attacker could easily outspend as the gains are greater than the perceived costs.)

It seems we have two choices:

1. Attempt to secure the elections at a tax payer cost of potentially billions of dollars. (And piss off everyone over this expense that creates no improvement in the quality of life of those paying.)
2. Do nothing, spend no money and piss off only about half the population.

I gotta tell ya, if this was a company, I'd be leaning toward #2.

cheers,

catch

PS. Before you pin this on my political beliefs, I am exceptionally liberal.

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Originally posted here by catch
It seems we have two choices:

1. Attempt to secure the elections at a tax payer cost of potentially billions of dollars. (And piss off everyone over this expense that creates no improvement in the quality of life of those paying.)
2. Do nothing, spend no money and piss off only about half the population.

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WTF ? How old is this? Oh well I will reply anyway: Voter Fraud is bad. Why?

Well a Democracy is about what the majority want right?
Not what the rich want.

So without securing the voting systems (or even trying) and leaving it wide open to fraudulent people/company's Democracy is gone.

But I am sure it doesnt matter in the US now anyway. Apparently the voting machines were the least secure devices ever or something... that what .. Berkely said I think it was... so long ago.

But securing the voting systems is hardly going to stop corruption (although its a step)

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Well a Democracy is about what the majority want right? Not what the rich want.

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Unfortunately idealism and risk management don't blend well.

So, how much is the presidency worth? $1 million? $100 million? $1 billion? $100 billion? How many corporate ties, legal changes, supreme court judges, whatever... how much? How about a Senator? A Congressman?

Now how much do we want to spend of securing elections? $0.01 per user? $1 per user? Is a security system costing $100 million likely to be effective if the potential attackers have considerably more than that to gain?

What if your district taxes the hell out of you to pay for improved security but some place across the country makes no such expenses and suffers huge fraud which is covered up by the incumbents... do you think your tax money was well spent?

Think back to the 2000 election, how many Bush supporters wanted to even consider the possibility of voter fraud? Do you think it would have been different if Gore won suspiciously? The same argument, half the population at any given time doesn't care about voter fraud (not to mention those put in power by such fraud).

From a simple cost benefit evaluation, one can only come to the conclusion that American democracy is dead. Which is dramatic and grim, but I see no other way to read the numbers and consequently no way to justify throwing the money away.

cheers,

catch

I agree. American Democracy is dead.

Apparently Bush and Kerry had almost the exact same scores at yale (that is **** scores)
And the fact that the US fools can only vote for A or B is such a redundant expression of democracy anyway. especially when there is no real difference between the two.

Then again there are other ways to change the world *hacks into DOD* lol

Hmmm,

Over here there has been discussion of electronic voting, but I feel it is a good way off.

My question for you, Catch is: do you have postal voting?.....that is where there is a real potential for fraud.

It is OK to have ballot box and electronic security systems tight, but you must not forget postal votes if they are allowed.

The reason I mention this is that we have had a big scandal over here just recently...........it is dead easy to hijack a postal vote :eek:

:)

I went to vote in the UK elections in May.
I've moved house recently, not far so I'm at the same polling station.
I didn't get my polling card so I went down with my passport driving licence etc.

I spoke to the official and told him I didn't have a polling card and that I had moved house.

I gave him my old address he found me on the register and handed me the ballot forms.

I actually offered my passport to check but he wouldn't do it. Very scary. I really could have been anyone.

how hard does it technically have to be to create a secure e-vote machine? I know this question can spawn a whole mess of questions and concerns but hear me out...

First you dont make it possible to be transmitted over any internet technology. Machine has to be hooked up in locked down area and then some program will tally the votes... The machine that you vote on is nothing more than a touch screen... No input/output options (ie keyboard, mouse, usb, serial, nothing). The admin mode of the machine doesnt have rights to anything more than a regular voter would.... the machine HAS to be connected a propriotary machine to be able to do anything (using its own 256 bit encryption whatever).

Now what other security issues are there? physical security? this is an issue with paper voting as well as mail voting (as nihil stated).

Does it matter how secure we make it? You have already stated what appears to be a pretty darn good truth, 1/2 of this country couldn't care. I give you the instance when Bush was first elected, thousands of pieces of paper with a little hole punched in them that either didnt punch right or was lined up wrong or whatever.... This may not be a computer but a security issue on its own.

As far as what price do you put on an election? You can't, it infintely influences everything in the economy, worldwide and nationally. It influences every judge that is behind such and such party/person, every cabinent member, etc... there is no end

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First you dont make it possible to be transmitted over any internet technology. Machine has to be hooked up in locked down area and then some program will tally the votes... The machine that you vote on is nothing more than a touch screen... No input/output options (ie keyboard, mouse, usb, serial, nothing). The admin mode of the machine doesnt have rights to anything more than a regular voter would.... the machine HAS to be connected a propriotary machine to be able to do anything (using its own 256 bit encryption whatever).

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First off you need to have the system evaluated by multiple independent agencies with public findings. The security proofs, the source code, everything must be made public, and there must be a way to spot audit any given machine at any given time to ensure that it has not been tampered with.
Next, every single vote must be auditable while not identifying the voter. Perhaps some sort of delayed line printer that prints out 10 votes at a time using two encryption keys. One based on the voters authentication information (district code + pin + passphrase) and the other based on the aggregate of data collected at that site (vote, voter sequence, time). The first will allow any given voter to later look up their own vote to ensure it has been collected correctly. The second to ensure that entire pages cannot be thrown out.

You are still left with the system that can have unverifiable votes added. Where voters can arbitrarily denied the right (as happened in Florida). Where people don't care what the actual votes are, but what the media says they are. With a system that will be different in every state. A that will be prohibitively expensive because again, at any given time only half the country will care about such issues.

cheers,

catch

Sadly you are 100% correct as we both already knew.... but when has anyone cared about how much money the government seems to waste on everything anyway? 40,000 dollar hammers and such odd BS.

In the end whatever system they end up using probably wont be secure, whether it be paper (you can still add cards) or electronic (hackable, crackable, etc). Either method allows for votes to be altered to whomevers prefered outcome.

So back on track at what cost do you secure or come close to securing this method of voting? I don't think cost will matter, no matter how much money you spend on securing this, certain areas will lax and not follow security measures, others will be super tight, even the most secure of items has its weak points and allows for vulnerabilities. This brings you back to your other concern... Would anything happen if the election was rigged? Would anyone know? And would half the population actually take any action because of it. I don't think the outpour would be large enough that anything would happen other than an official statement saying "we are looking into it" blah blah blah

Just my 2 cents

seeing as the 'worlds biggest hacker' was able to hack the Pentagon! and NASA. Which I am sure have more defenses than your standard voting machine, I guess it would be kind of trivial to try and secure a voting machine that is connected to a WAN (I am assuming here). Without going into to much detail ( as I am sure your contract specifies ) what is the setup of this thing ? x86 on a WAN ? No disk drives or any of that crap I am assuming? ( I normally wouldn't post that dumb of a question, but as of late I have seen some pretty dumb sh*t ) Is it on a 802.3 ethernet, star or what ? I guess I am trying to say that it kinda depends on the setup. If it is on a windows machine then I wish you the best of luck. If it is some _totally_ unknown proprietary OS then you may have a shot.
... I am not even going to try and begin on the encryption schemes, althought some type of hash based off of voter ID and time and such wouldn't be a bad idea...
... but then again, I am only a repair tech. (cut me some slack, I am only starting my career :) )

I just don't get it. Us backwards cancucks are stil using paper ballots with big X'es for the vote and real, bona fide ballot boxes to vote with. And yet, we have never faced a fraud allegation like Americans have. I have no doubt that a paper ballot system is incredibly insecure, as it would be ridiculously easy to simply cast two ballots in there with minimal planning, but somehow, we don't have these problems. Maybe it's because we simply don't defraud democracy and then complain about its vital signs.

This leads me to believe that it is not in fact how we vote that determines the validity and honesty of an election. Since I doubt that where, when, or on what we vote has any effect, this only leaves one possibility - why we vote.

I do not have an answer which could explain the differences between why Canada (and perhaps the rest of the world) and America votes. But I see it as the only reasonable explanation for the fraud experienced in the United States, as opposed to here. Although Berkely may have decleared the voting machines to be the most insecure boxes ever made, I doubt a cardboard ballot box can hold water to them.

So perhaps it is not your voting system, but your electoral system as a whole that needs to be redesigned to prevent voter fraud?

I think more there attitudes.

But personally, I feel all is lost for US democracy (and has been since I can remember)
I say, bring on the downfall.

The us has a problem that it has a 2 party system.

I can not REALLY see the difference between them, maybe im to much of an outsider.

They simply look like two big party's that want to be the rulers. Everything in your election is centered around the presidential candidates and mudslinging. There is only red or blue. Democrat or republican.

How democratic are the democrats.
How much are the republicans trying pushing towards a republic system.

Its really a your with us or with them idea. And what is up with this states vote and then the guy that had the most votes in said state get the whole state systems. Sounds pretty whack to me.

And then you are suprised when there is fraud.

Btw. I think holland has been using electronical voting systems for some time now without any big frauds. dont know how they work precisely.

The original post, deals with cost from a purely business point of view. If this was the only consideration, countries like the UK would never have created a national health service.

The cost of creating a secure electronic voting system would be a one off cost. Maintenance is another thing.

So perhaps, if applying your, risk, cost, formula, raises questions for you. It may be interesting to look at the long term implications. Is there a saving in manpower, paper and setup, in the long run? Is it possible to obtain a more accurate vote count? After all, computers are far better than man at doing tedious tasks, like counting.

Security is not just about cost, it's about a whole lot of different things to different people.

Be a Libertarian like me, then you know how it feels to really get ass raped each election. What happened to my guy this election?.... OH YEA HE WAS IN ****ING JAIL.

Public/Private Key Pairs...?

Idealy everyone would have their own private key and bring it to the booths. Then a single public/private key pair is generated per election and the public key is provided to the voting booth/presincts so they can record the votes so that only the central site can compile them...

But signing the vote (with their key pair) might give away the voter's identification...so some sort of other way to sign it based on other information would need to be devised. It would have to also make it impossible to drop votes. I guess each voting site could have a key pair and it might be possible to sign the data with that pair (and the vote can't be decoded since the key pairs are different). So somehow each prescint would be held responsible for the votes they submit.

At least this is sort of the track I'm led to think may be possible. Of course if the information is tampered with before it is encrypted (which is entirely possible) you're SOL...and if the votes are recorded to some other media there may be problems, etc...

Cheers.

Some major things you all are forgetting:

Each district pays for their own system, consequently there is no single system that will be adopted. Clearly poor areas cannot afford, and rural areas are less interested in some fancy pants system with private keys and god knows what.

A verifiable hard copy must exist.

The vote must not be traceable to a single voter.

Half the population doesn't care if the election is stolen, so they feel they have nothing to gain by paying for security.

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Security is not just about cost, it's about a whole lot of different things to different people.

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Security is no more than cost avoidance. Is it cheaper to eat the loss or to secure something? Anything else is merely a misunderstanding of cost. It is like the question, "How much is a human life worth?" Clearly the answer is not "infinite" otherwise it would be perfectly reasonable to dump all the money in the world to keeping a single person on life support alive, consequently there must be a definable cost. You may now like the idea, unfortunately it is a universal principal of risk management.

cheers,

catch

Catch does bring up an interesting point regarding half the population not caring about the election being stolen......

But then what we are really talking about is the cost of freedom. Without a properly run and verifyable election procedure from start to finish then you no longer have a democratic process, (forget about the electoral college for those of you who want to make a political discussion out of this - take it to Cosmos or chit-chat where it belongs). What you have is a monarchy with the richest and most powerful playing King. At that point even those that _think_ they won have actually lost - maybe not today - but in a few years time certainly.

While it still comes back to the question of what the general public will pay for a truly democratic process the question still remains - What is the cost of freedom? The apathetic masses don't really care because they can't see past their noses let alone the monarchy that may present itself 10 years down the road.

While it might seem like a good idea to build computerized machines to take, tally and report votes I'm afraid I have to revert to an old adage of mine.... Sometimes there are no technological solutions to an administrative problem. I believe this is one of those issues. Leave the system alone. Make people get off their asses and go to the precinct to vote. Make them take their card and cast their ballot and then employ/use volunteers to count those ballots. For the forseeable future it is:-

1. Probably more cost effective
2. Less prone to accusation of fraud
3. Less able to be compromised in a way that is not discoverable, (thus allowing for conspiracy theories)
4. It has an auditable paper trail that does not conflict with any other "trail"
5. People, (excluding those in Palm Beach County Fl.), already understand it and aren't intimidated by it.
6. It is affordable by all constituencies in the US
7. It has worked for a few hundred years.

All of which, it seems to me, is, in the end, beneficial for democracy in the US.

Catch, recommend that, for security and therefore cost reasons, that the system remain as it is.... and see what they say..... I have $5 says they want this "solution" for the same reason Oakland County here wants to go entirely wireless... To look trendy regardless of the cost and insecurity.... When you present them with a more effective solution to their "perceived" problem they will stop conversing with you.... ;)